Commodity Fetishism

[Servia]

I have been reading and watching some videos about commodity fetishism, but I'm still not really getting it.

Anyone care to give me a clear or simple explanation?

Thanks

[ñángara]

It's like hiding the collective character of social work by a relationship between objects (commodities). It's better realized when you think of money fetishism.

[ckaihatsu]

This is always the classical example:





Tulip mania or tulipomania (Dutch names include: tulpenmanie, tulpomanie, tulpenwoede, tulpengekte and bollengekte) was a period in the Dutch Golden Age during which contract prices for bulbs of the recently introduced tulip reached extraordinarily high levels and then suddenly collapsed.[2]

At the peak of tulip mania, in March 1637, some single tulip bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman. It is generally considered the first recorded speculative bubble (or economic bubble),[3] although some researchers have noted that the Kipper- und Wipperzeit episode in 1619–22, a Europe-wide chain of debasement of the metal content of coins to fund warfare, featured mania-like similarities to a bubble.[4] The term "tulip mania" is now often used metaphorically to refer to any large economic bubble (when asset prices deviate from intrinsic values).[5]




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

[Noa Rodman]

Tulip mania is mentioned (eg in the movie Wall Street: money never sleeps) always as an example of speculation, where the 'true price' of a commodity is lost sight of. The fetishism of commodities is something else.
Money, which is a thing, usually silver or gold, becomes the direct embodiment of universal labour-time. In the past the effort to make a product could be estimated. With the introduction of money people no longer can do that, rather they rely on certain weights (a standard, eg an ounce) of a certain thing (eg gold) to express the approximate value of a product for sale (eg wool). Commodity fetishism is not about what sort of material is used as the thing money, but about the fact that money exists at all.

The difficulty for us today in understanding commodity fetishism I think is due to the introduction of paper money, which is not a thing that expresses the value of a commodity in terms of its own weight. As Moishe Postone wrote: "social relations in capitalism can seem as though they have nothing to do with the commodity form of social mediation. Rather, these relations can appear either to be pregiven or to be constituted ultimately by convention, by contracts among self-determining individuals."

[tuwix]

I have been reading and watching some videos about commodity fetishism, but I'm still not really getting it.

Anyone care to give me a clear or simple explanation?

Thanks

Let's take an iPad. There are many tablets cheaper and even better but people get crazy on that with half-apple. And there is pressure to have it even if it is completely useless for you...

[Kill all the fetuses!]

No, no, no, a thousand times no. People seem to fundamentally misunderstand what commodity-fetishism is all about. It has nothing to do with "hidden" abstract labour as such, money or our knowledge about commodities.

Commodity-fetishism means that, while commodities and commodity-form as such is a creation of human beings (who's else creation could it be?), it now exists as an independent force controlling our lives. So now it's not me or society at large who decides what, how and to whom a thing ought to be produced, but now it's "the market", as an independent force, which guides all my actions in regards to the production process. This is what Marx means, when he says in the Capital: "It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things."

Furthermore, the very next sentence says the following: "In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race." This is an analogy to commodity-fetishism, which shows that while the concept of gods is a creation of human beings, it now becomes an autonomous independent forces, which controls humans themselves.

So everyone could study the Capital and know everything Marx has every written by heart and yet it would still change nothing, because we would still be controlled through the law of value, we would still have commodity-fetishism.

[Noa Rodman]

I didn't want to suggest that it was about perception.



[...]commodity fetishism has been severed from its value theoretical context and been "capitalized" on by modern cultural criticism all along the political spectrum. This serves to co-opt Marx' theory by diluting it as T.W. Adorno has remarked:
Thinking consoles itself by easily imagining to possess the philosophers' stone with respect to the dissolution of reification, of the commodity character. But reification itself is the form of reflection of false objectivity; to center theory about it, a form of consciousness, makes critical theory idealistically acceptable to the ruling consciousness and the collective unconsciousness. To this circumstance Marx' early writings, in contrast to Capital, owe their current vogue, especially among theologians."

(quote from Reification and the consciousness of the critics of political economy: studies in the development of Marx’ theory of value) (http://ir.uiowa.edu/books/25/)

[Noa Rodman]

Let's take an iPad. There are many tablets cheaper and even better but people get crazy on that with half-apple. And there is pressure to have it even if it is completely useless for you...

Marx is not concerned with the use-value of a commodity (nor with the the artificiality of the need).

[blake 3:17]

haha was trying to send a useful link, and this is what's there:


Marx-Engels Archive

“File No Longer Available!”

The file you have tried to access originated from the Marx Engels Collected Works. Lawrence & Wishart, who hold the copyright for the Marx Engels Collected Works, have directed Marxists Internet Archive to delete all texts originating from MECW. Accordingly, from 30th April 2014, no material from MECW is available from marxists.org. English translations of Marx and Engels from other sources will continue to be available.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/410.htm

You might wish top see this for a bit more on the issue: https://www.marxists.org/admin/legal/lw-response.html

[ckaihatsu]

haha was trying to send a useful link, and this is what's there:





Marx-Engels Archive

“File No Longer Available!”

The file you have tried to access originated from the Marx Engels Collected Works. Lawrence & Wishart, who hold the copyright for the Marx Engels Collected Works, have directed Marxists Internet Archive to delete all texts originating from MECW. Accordingly, from 30th April 2014, no material from MECW is available from marxists.org. English translations of Marx and Engels from other sources will continue to be available.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/410.htm

You might wish top see this for a bit more on the issue: https://www.marxists.org/admin/legal/lw-response.html


Quick, everyone take a volume and memorize it word-for-word...!


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451

[RedMaterialist]

I have been reading and watching some videos about commodity fetishism, but I'm still not really getting it.

Anyone care to give me a clear or simple explanation?

Thanks

Here is a stab at it. A commodity is a thing with objective, physical qualities but has value only as a social product of subjective, generalized, labor. It appears as an object but has reality only as a social relation. Like a religious fetish it has the appearance of an object (a wooden cross) which for the worshipper has a personal, subjective, magical, value.

In capitalism workers see only the physical reality of their production. Their production is actually a social relation. The products develop fantastic, fetishized social relations between themselves, while the relations between humans become objectified. How this happens I don't know.

Commodity money is a social relationship which appears as a physical thing (either gold, paper or computer entries.) Human relations become monetized.

((All from marx's the fetishism of commodities))

I have often thought that automobiles (esp in the US) are a commodity fetish. Cars are physical objects produced by a complex social process. Cars then develop social, competitive relations with each other. Some cars are well behaved, like civics and accords, some are animals like mustangs and eagles, some are frontierspeople like the tundra, the silverado, the Sonora. Then you have the engineers who use numbers: F150, bmw 380, 380z, etc etc. The names are also social products of ad agencies, market testing. Yet humans in the us treat their cars as personal, individualized representations of themselves. (I'm Not talking about the twelve revolutionaries living here.)

Cars, like religious icons (god, Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Moses, David, Mohamed, Buddha), develop personalities.

But humans then behave toward each other like the cars or trucks they are driving. What more appropriate emotion could one have in an American built auto than road rage?

Veblen's conspicuous consumption might be analyzed with commodity fetishism.

In short, a commodity appears to be an independent object but is really a social, subjective, process. It appears to be something which it is not, i.e, a fetish.

[Noa Rodman]

humans who eg treat cars as personal representations of themselves often also built their car themselves (ie they didn't buy it, so it's not a commodity, so your example is not what Marx is after).



The difficulty with a commodity is that, like all categories of the capitalist mode of production, it represents a personal relationship under a material wrapping. The producers relate their different kinds of labour to one another as general human labour by relating their products to one another as commodities — they cannot accomplish it without this mediation of things. The relation of persons thus appears as the relation of things.

...

Commodities can be related as values and, hence, as commodities only by comparison with some other commodity as the universal equivalent. But only the social act can make a particular commodity the universal equivalent — money.
The immanent contradiction in a commodity as the direct unity of use-value and exchange-value, as the product of useful private labour... and as the direct social materialization of abstract human labour — this contradiction finds no rest until it results in duplicating the commodity into commodity and money. (P.48 [87])
Since all other commodities are merely particular equivalents of money, and money is their universal equivalent, they are related to money as particular commodities to the universal commodity. (P.51 [89]) The process of exchange gives the commodity which it converts into money, not its value, but its value-form. (P.51 [89]) Fetishism (belief in a supernatural power of objects): a commodity does not seem to become money only because the other commodities all express their values in it, but, conversely, they seem to express their values in it because it is money.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/1868-syn/ch01.htm#1

[Noa Rodman]

If you don't add chapter 2 on exchange (the riddle of money), I think you just will understand commodity fetishism as a society where everyone is a barterer of the things they make.

[RedMaterialist]

humans who eg treat cars as personal representations of themselves often also built their car themselves (ie they didn't buy it, so it's not a commodity, so your example is not what Marx is after).




https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/1868-syn/ch01.htm#1

Thanks for the link to Engels.

Engels:

The difficulty with a commodity is that, like all categories of the capitalist mode of production, it represents a personal relationship under a material wrapping. .

I.e., an automobile represents a personal relationship wrapped in a material object. An auto built by someone for their own use would not be a commodity, since it's not built for sale.

Engels also says that fetishism is the belief in the supernatural power of objects. How does that explain commodity fetishism?

[Noa Rodman]

another exegete tries his best:
[..]each person apparently works for himself, and the manner in which he obtains the product of others does not seem to be attributable to the social character of their labour, but to the peculiarities of the product itself. It does not now seem that the potter and the cultivator work for each other, and that consequently pottery work and cultivation are necessary for civilisation, but that certain mystical qualities inhere in the pots and the field produce which bring about their exchange in certain proportions. The relation between persons, which determines the social character of labour, assumes the appearance of a relation between things, viz.: products, under the system of commodity production. So long as production was directly socialised, it was subject to the decisions and direction of society, and the relations of producers to each other were manifest. As soon, however, as various kinds of work were carried on by individuals independently of each other, as soon, therefore, as production became planless, the relations of producers to each other appeared as the relations of products. Henceforth the determination of the relations of producers to each other no longer rested with themselves; these relations developed independently of the wills of men; the social powers grew over their heads. To the simple intelligences of past centuries they seemed to be divine powers, and to later enlightened centuries they seemed to be the powers of Nature.


The natural forms of commodities are now invested with qualities which seem to be mystical, in so far as they cannot be explained from the relations of producers to each other. Just as the fetish worshipper ascribed to his fetish qualities which had no existence in its natural constitution, so to bourgeois economy the commodity seems a sensuous thing endowed with supersensuous qualities. Marx calls this “the fetishism attaching to labour products when they present themselves as commodities – a fetishism which is inseparable from the mode of production.”
Marx was the first to detect the fetishistic character of commodities, and, as we shall see later on, of capital also. It is this fetishism which makes it difficult to perceive the peculiarities of the commodity, and, until its importance has been properly appreciated, it is impossible to reach a clear understanding of commodity-value. The chapter in Capital entitled The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof seems to us one of the most important in the book, to which every student ought to pay special attention. It is precisely this chapter which has been most neglected by the opponents, and even by the supporters, of the Marxian doctrines.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1903/economic/ch01.htm

[RedMaterialist]

humans who eg treat cars as personal representations of themselves often also built their car themselves (ie they didn't buy it, so it's not a commodity, so your example is not what Marx is after).




https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/1868-syn/ch01.htm#1

A person who builds their own car has a real personal relationship with their product, not a magical one. A commodity alienates that relationship and replaces it with a fetishistic one.

[Noa Rodman]

Yeah so, in case of self-build car there is the same psychology you talk about (of humans treating their cars as personal, individualized representations of themselves), yet it is not a commodity, thus the psychological obsession you talk about is not related to the car as commodity (since it also exists for non-commodified use-objects). What your car example sounds more like is what hippies/buddhists types condemn as over-attachment to your possessions.

[RedMaterialist]

Building your own car is a kind of hobby. You love what you do and the car is part of your own reality. The car as commodity is an unreal fetish. It's not the over attachment that is the fetish but the belief that the commodity has some kind of magical quality. My wife just bought a box of Orville redenbacher's "skinny girl" popcorn. She thinks it has the magical quality of making her skinny again.

[Subversive]

Commodity fetishism is the process that basically hides the value of the labor of the worker under the concept that the commodity itself holds a different value than the labor and materials used to create it, that the commodity itself must be evaluated by what value it has on "the market", compared to all other products. This value, that is simultaneously both the creation of the market and is also created by the market, is the fetish - a commodity made 'alive' so that it has its own discrete reality apart from what constitutes its actual value, its use-value and its labor value.
This creation of a commodity-fetish, the embodiment of the living world of "the market", is ultimately what perpetuates the common belief that Capitalism is beneficial to the worker - what suppresses people's understanding that the workers labor-value is ultimately what forms the true value of the commodity and is being exploited by those whom own the means of production.

This has nothing to do with psychological effects of owning cars or whatnot, unless the car-owner is selling that car and believes it holds more value on the market than the labor he put into it only because he loves the car. Therefore he believes the car holds a different value than the labor only because he believes the car is a fetish, a living thing which must find its own value compared to the values of other cars, of which he believes his fetish (the car) to be the most important and therefore the most valuable of all cars like his own.
It is not about the personal relationship of owning a product, it is about the way society sees commodities - as things which gain value external to the real-world as part of society - as if the commodities themselves were part of society - as if the commodities themselves were living, thinking things which required them to be worth more than merely the sum of their parts.

Marx would compare commodity fetishism to religion due to the similar nature - Religion implies that the human being holds a substance more valuable than merely the human being, containing a "soul", and that this soul can be more valuable than the human being himself. The commodity fetish is therefore the "soul" of the commodity - the property which is held as being worth more than the commodity itself. Therefore, when the labor of the worker is put into a commodity he does not realize that this commodity is a product of his labor but instead thinks that it is the product of the process of his labor - the act of creating the product is merely second to that of which gives it a 'soul', the act of which is alienated from the worker - because the worker himself is alienated from himself.

Does this clarify anything?

[Noa Rodman]

"The mystical character of commodities does not originate, therefore, in their use value. Just as little does it proceed from the nature of the determining factors of value." (factors such as abstract labour/socially-necessary labour time).

The mystical/magical property is the form of value: exchange value.

"To what extent some economists are misled by the Fetishism inherent in commodities, or by the objective appearance of the social characteristics of labour, is shown, amongst other ways, by the dull and tedious quarrel over the part played by Nature in the formation of exchange value. Since exchange value is a definite social manner of expressing the amount of labour bestowed upon an object, Nature has no more to do with it, than it has in fixing the course of exchange (eg 1 euro = 1.09 dollar)."